There’s a segment of Android users that take pride in their ability to tweak and adjust every part of the operating system on their smartphone until it performs at optimal levels. Unfortunately, a recently released app took advantage of that group by promising a quick fix to a laggy mobile experience.

Many Android users who root their phones also install a custom version of Android. Many of these custom ROMs offer more functionality and try to improve on things like battery life. One of the more common ways to improve battery life is the use of a CPU governor, which handles the scaling of the processor. If your CPU scales down quickly when not in use, and only scales up when absolutely necessary, there stands a good chance that there will be some rewards in the battery department. On occasion, scaling your battery down as far as possible can cause a slight delay when you expect it to scale back up instantly. The result is a slight performance lag as the phone struggles to jump when you ask it to. This is a fairly common problem with ROMs that have improperly implemented CPU governors.

One developer thought that he had found the solution to all the lag problems he and so many other were experiencing by adjusting the entropy pool in Android. Most users have no idea what the entropy pool is for or how it is used. The Seeder app is an attempt to make sure the entropy pool is never empty by feeding /dev/urandom to /dev/random. In general this is a bad practice, but what the developer noticed was that his phone saw immediate performance gains, and shared his app with the world. Within hours, there were hundreds of users claiming that Seeder was the cure-all to lag problems on Android.

Unfortunately, shortly after this, reality set in. Google employees quickly responded to the bug report on the Android forums and explained that the effect being seen was purely placebo. It seems that /dev/random is only used for cryptography operations, so the only way you would possibly see a difference would be if you had a massive number of separate SSL instances running. Since most users don’t use their phone this way, it was now time to address why some users felt their phones were faster. Arcee of the CyanogenMod project explained that the app is forcing the CPU to stick to higher clock frequencies due to the constant I/O use. For many users, the processor running faster offers a smoother experience at the cost of your battery. As many users began to notice, Seeder was causing otherwise full day smartphones to die in four hours.

This is a mostly harmless situation, and the users who purchased the app from the Play Store are only out $1.49 if the developer doesn’t opt to refund everyone for the app. As Android power users continue their search for that precious oasis in between the deserts of battery life and user experience, situations like this are a perfect example of why root access is not for everyone.